M249 Re-Animated | CS:GO Mod Showcase

While much of the people are moving on to Counter Strike, here I am desperately looking for ways to downgrade back to Global Offensive.
Modding a game is like designing your own drugs, you might have trouble playing without mods if you really value what the aesthetics could have been. That's why I never got too into 5v5 competitive play: the weapon models are acceptable, the animations are acceptable, those scratches and wear Valve deliberately put on the guns are acceptable, but even after 7 years I couldn't bear hearing those stupidly plastic gun sounds.
This means I stayed a long time in CSGO community servers, usually in zombie escape so I can have more opportunities shooting at a moving target while experiencing the thrills of running from something.
I will move to CS2 when the modding tools are more accessible and more complete, or when the community servers are fully caught up with CS2.
Back to the M249. This gun is possibly the most technically difficult as well as the most fun to make. Without much thinking you would be able to guess it's because of the ammo belt.
This re-animation was actually attempted a few years ago, and in the end I couldn't get myself to release it because in addition to the awkward weapon movement, the ammo belt is just not fun to look at. The ammo belt is chained together using IK and as you'd expect, looks very stiff.
On TH-cam there isn't a tutorial specifically on how to efficiently animate an ammo belt. Most of the tutorials I can find either has the bullets simply slide along a fixed path, or requires rigid bodies which makes me completely lose control of the ammo belt.
But eventually I found out a method that gives me more control than the IK, CV curves. Set up a suitable number of points you want to influence the shape of the curves, then attach the ammo belt bone to the curves, and now you have an ammo belt that you can animate by moving the points.
As good as it sounds, this method isn't used except when the player is feeding the ammo belt onto the tray. Most other parts like shooting, chambering new rounds or simply jiggling, the bullets are all hand-keyed. Even when CV is used, I couldn't perfectly shape the curve. But IMO it's impressive how much it makes lives easier. Just be sure you get the procedure right.
Other than that, the animations were all remade, the M249 now shows weight, especially when inspecting the weapon and in the intro cutscene. Certainly 4-point momentum at its best.
Few years ago, when I'm trying to make the reload animation, the right hand is holding the pistol grip when the left hand is doing all the handling part. When I'm thinking up ideas on how to reload this gun, I had a revelation when watching Modern Warfare 2019 reloads: it actually makes so much sense using right hand to to hold the handguard when reloading, what person would be strong enough to lift an 8kg weapon by holding anywhere but the center of gravity?
Other than that, I had lots of fun playing with the stuff on the weapons, like the tray when it's empty, the carrying handle's hand-keyed physics, the dust cover moving along with the charging handle, and the feed system in the intro cutscene. You might notice this cutscene has some Firearms: Source energy into it, I'm surprised there isn't any other game that has the player doing this, so it leaves quite an impression and I want to do that in the cutscene as well.
I really wish the M249 would take more time to draw and reload, because 1 second draw time and 5.5 second reload time is a very tight timespan to create a good-looking animation with that much handling. In the first version of reload animation, I actually had time to have the left hand retract the ammo belt into the ammo box, so if you're reloading with only a few bullets left, the ammo belt wouldn't magically fly off with the ammo box. The showcase video conveniently didn't show this because I forgot to.
And yeah, this weapon took me a few months to complete. Life has its way of making my time schedule a strategic mess.
Download, "studioM249":
drive.google.c...
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Credits :
-Weapon model from Valve
-Sound from CS1.6, CS:GO by by Valve, Payday 2 from OVERKILL
-Animation by [Me] #include[studio.h]
-Additional modelling and textureing by [Me] #include[studio.h]
-Animation made using Blender 3D
-CSGO MIGI mod loader by Zool Smith

[@erdf1778]

I really admire your animations, I wish valve would officially replace the current outdated anims with your remakes, but sadly I don't think that's gonna happen

[@includestudio.h7775]

To say that Valve would put any fan made animation into the game would be beyond impossible. On the other hand, I was kind of hoping they would make bigger changes to the animations even if it's not made by me. They did spend some effort on the ammo belt in CS2 though.
Regardless, appreciated.

[@Dylan1234567890]

Man you should get hired by valve,WE NEED TO GET THIS MAN NOTICED BY VALVE

[@includestudio.h7775]

Unfortunately I'm having trouble looking into M249's history. Looking to Wikipedia I've seen nothing but this weapon being unreliable, but it doesn't seem to explain why it's appearing in almost every realistic FPS shooter game. I'll try to write a good one later. Apologies.

[@beingsactual]

It's a mainstay of squad automatic firepower in the US Military, and any prominent weapon in its arsenal is bound for fame in media cooperating with the DoD. It's also practically just a configuration of the ubiquitous FN Minimi, so its extremely close blood relatives are all over the world, and many successors are very similar, at least outwardly. It has a universally recognizeable look of *the* hand-held belt-fed machinegun because it mostly is that for much of the world. Media presence is also somewhat self-perpetuating - it's put on screen and looks like a big mean MG, so more people put it on screen to look big and mean. And M249 has been around for a few decades, keeping the ball rolling.
Its reliability issues are owed to lower-than-desirable resistance to ingress of dirt and sand, especially prominent since many of the conflicts it found itself in were in desert environments. It bears mentioning that it was officially adopted in 1982, but first saw heavy use in 1991, in the Gulf War, so most units likely had a fair few years of training use and a number of retrofits behind them before being pushed into real combat in messy environments.

[@includestudio.h7775]

@@beingsactual This is truly insightful, and makes a lot of sense come to think of it. Since everything needed for an SAW/LMG is pretty much here in the M249, then all it needs is some upgrade here and there and that'll do. No wonder.
Maybe I should write something about SAW as a concept and how the M249 replaced the M60 then.
Much appreciated.